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I will be posting monthly recaps of my gaming which I have been doing in GeekLists. I'll also be commenting on games on occasion, though I can tell you that I will be behind the curve because I just don't get to play the new games as soon as some people do.

I played 30 games a total of 68 times and three expansions a total of 14 times. Six of the games and one of the expansions were new to me in December. I played 11 of the games in November.

The construction on house is almost done, so I will be able to break a majority of the games out of storage purgatory and, after another trip to hell (a.k.a., IKEA), I will have new shelves to display most of the games.

The one the thing I have come to realize is I should cull some of the games. We'll see if I actually manage to do that this year.

After not playing the game system in person for months, I played the this weekend after playing the original. Nico picked it up and we broke it out and got in a couple of games. I like the trophy effects and the addition of the Fanatic to beat on when there is not monster in the center row. I'm still not a fan of the art but it doesn't detract from the game play, so it not a real issue. I still won't buy another game in the series, but if I was going to buy one of them it would likely be this set because it has the most variety.

My first time being part of a losing game. I spent much of the game one point away from going insane and the last half of the game being one stamina shy of dying, but I survived until the battle at the end, where I went first and had two turns at trying to smack the bad guy before dying.

Game two was a close one, which we won on the last roll (because you can never win on the first roll). If the roll had failed, we would have had to go to the final battle against that devilish Yog-Sothoth.

Game 3 was a meat grinder as Mike and I each had multiple characters die, with my last one being just as Shub-Niggurath woke, leaving Mike and Hilary to be slaughtered by the old goat without me.

Finally, we ended the year defining why Hastur was the King in Yellow. That was the color of the stain on his robes when he saw how powerful we were!

The first two were four-player games broken up by the gumbo making mentioned above. It's hard for a couple of parents to play a game quickly when passing a squirmy baby between them, so these took a little longer than maybe they should have, but that is still okay with me.

I also played a couple of two-player games with Nico. I like the game best with two players, a little less with three, and a little less with four, because it ends just as you can get a strategy rolling.

I thought it was an okay game after our first playing, probably because it didn't flow well. I was willing to play it again, and I was back at Mike and Hilary's the next night and I liked the game much better because it flowed so much better because we knew the rules. And we played three more times the next time I was there, and it was then that Hilary became known as "Hot Spot" because she always hits the hot spots when it is her time to spread the fire.

The last chance we had to play it was New Year's Eve, when someone should have come up with a nickname for me because I kept spreading the fire onto the people we were supposed to be saving.

If you're looking for a Pandemic-like cooperative game, this will likely be a good choice.

Neither Nico nor Rob had played this before, so I gave a quick overview and we played. I managed to collect four of the gates (25 points) and both sets of the queen (15 points each) and won the game. I suspect both the guys would do better next game.

Eight players! (Well, two of them were younger kids teaming up with their dads.)

This was one of those "the dice love me" games as I rolled at least three points every turn over five turns and won without going into Tokyo. Normally, you would expect to see more bloodshed in a six player game, but sometimes the winner is just that much better than the rest of the rabble.

This has some similarities to Through the Desert in that you are placing pieces on the board, trying to connect to certain areas. The real difference for me is the way you score changes every game, as does the board set-up.

After Mike, Hilary and I played it, I ended up buying it at the store the next time I was there to play. I looked into getting the Capitol promo tile, but the rules can be used by placing anything in the appropriate cities, so I wasn't willing to spend too much to get it, but I arranged a trade for one. It will also be available from the Geek store sometime soon.

The game also was a hit with the guys at the store, so it might see a bit of play in the near future. Whether or not it has staying power is another question.

Two months in a row! This time, only Michael had played before, Nico owns it and hadn't played it, and Kevin and Anne were new to it. I had a bad feeling the entire game that things were not going my way. Nico won the game and it seemed like everyone enjoyed playing it.

My strategy for giving Corrupted Quiddity to others is to give it to someone who has no creatures ready to score, preferably someone with most of his dice in the discard pile so they get tossed in the bag before they can cull them. The negative to this is that the player which is about to score gets stronger. If that is the case, then give them the die so they have to cull it instead of something else, hopefully slowing them down.

I did end up ditching the Plano storage solution and am now keeping the dice in three different bags. One is for the basic dice (including the Corrupted Quiddity), one has all the spells, and the other has all the creatures. The bags and other components are in a "Really Useful Boxes" plastic box which is simple to open up and seal safely. I'll probably keep it in there until the expansion comes out this summer which is supposed to be a storage box for everything to date.

This game is actually starting to be not that fun to play. When Michael and I play it really feels more like whomever is drawing the cards they need is going to win and not the best player. Maybe we are too evenly matched? I also notice this less with three players, which could be because each player is selecting only one role a turn and that mitigates some of the runaway feelings the lucky card draws can cause.

Wow, the rulebook is pretty big for what appears to be a simple card game. It has a similar feel to Web of Power in that you are playing cards for influence and then choose from face-up cards for your hand. It was also a fairly quick game and I spent too much time trying to set up big scores while Mike looked to score as often as possible, which worked better and he easily won.

The production values for the game are really nice and it appears to be well-worth the cost for the components . The game is fun, though I'm not sold on buying it for myself. It worked really well as a two-player game.

A couple of weeks later we played a three-player game and Mike had no fun at all. He went the entire game without seeing a Gluttony sin card. They would either come up when he took a card from the display, or were taken before it was his turn or drawn blind by Hilary and I. He was almost ready to sell the game after we played the second time. We spent a lot of time having to search the rules for what seemed like simple questions, and they weren't easy to find and Hilary said she wasn't paying attention the latter half of the game because no one really seemed to know how to play. Sometimes I wish all games came with a simple flow chart.

The first game was very low scoring, as was the second time we played when the scores were bunched together. Mike and I tied at 19 and Hilary had 18. Yeah, Mike won, by the tiebreaker, but the dice still love me.

Not a good game for me. I was playing against three people who have played it a lot more than I have and they were working more on strategies, while I was being tactical. I ended up in dead last, which is okay since I do like the game a lot.

Mike and I played. He's played once and I played a few times and we both had only played the bad guys. He let me play the heroes and I chose the Paladin, the Ember Mage, and the Barbarian. I probably lost the game when I decided to place the starting point in the center square, but it still made it to the final fight with the dragon and he had to go into time out before he finished off the heroes.

We played a three-player game on the Legendary Asia map. Mike and I also looked of the team map and suspect it will play well with two or three players instead of using teams, which I can't see ever doing. Mike thought he and Hilary might play teams with their kids at some point to teach them the game, which sounds pretty cool.

I did end up picking the map pack up and hope to start playing some flavors of the game a little more in the next year.

I hadn't played this in a while and kept missing little things about the game that we discovered as we were playing, mostly thanks to the player aide cards which were included. Ben really liked the game and I think Nico and Michael would like to play it again, so I probably should add it to the list of games I bring along.

I've also never played the advanced game. I like the basic rules as they are and enjoy the game enough that I see no need to modify the game.